It’s January 2022, and I already have a contender for one of the year’s most charming indie games. Five hours in and I have managed my first 25-minute run in Vampire Survivors. I’m in a library surrounded by witches and 🦩my character can’t keep up—I think it’s a lack of damage upgrades. I invested way too much in the wings that boost my movement speed. I have an evolved Magic Wand that is shredding the weird floating heads, but not quite enough, not enough, and… I’m dead. Who needs movement speed if you’re dead? I sit back in my chair and take a deep breath. Time for another run.
Vampire Survivors is a tiny indie game that arrived in the middle of December to little fanfare. After it was picked up by a few popular YouTubers and Twitch streamers, it has raced up the Steam trending list and is now stretching toward 4,000 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam. Much like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Loop Hero last year, the game is pretty simplistic in terms of gameplay, but therein lies its elegance. It’s like a browser game played, cheekily, at the back of a classroom. It’s a guilty pleasure. It’s a bullet hell, time survival, roguelite where you play as a series of powerful Vampiric characters, each with their own unique ability. I can’t put it down. Even better? Vampire Sur🎉vivors is 25735294117 times cheaper thanꦅ Activision-Blizzard, apparently. That’s £2.72.
The game is a series of dopamine hits. Your first run is a disaster. You won’t make it past ten minutes, but you do get some gold and unlock some new weapons. That’s hit number one—time to start another run. That goes okay, but you still can’t make it past the ten-mi💞nute mark. At least you evolved a weapon for the first time. Hit number two. An achievement list opens up before you. All of these things can be unlocked - no, that’s not quite right, they have to be unlocked. I won’t sleep until they are. Weapons, characters, buffs. A whole catalog of unlockables. Hit number three. Then it’s four am.
What stands out about Vampire Survivors is its smallness. It cost less than a sandwich, took 34 seconds to download, and runs pretty smoothly until the very late game. The screen turns into a chaotic swirl of pixels at that point, and that’s part of the fun. I♒t’s simple and effective and completely unassuming. I shouldn’t be playing a game like this for five hours straight. I have to do the washing up. I need to write thirty more Lost Ark guides.
My flatmate asks me if I want some lunch, and I grunt at him. “You’ve been playing that game for hours. It’s the same level, mate.” I shrug and say, after all, why not? Why shouldn’t I play it? What business is it of yours what I do with my free time? He says, “I’m not trying to stop you 🦂from playing. I’m just trying to help you.” He has a point of course.
The Microsoft Acti-Blizz deal is all everyone can talk about today, but tak𒐪e a moment to consider an indie game like Vampire Survivor, which is right at the other end of the video game spectrum. It’s a little gem that is a testament to the power of indie games. It was created by a solo developer called Luca. . Even in a land of metaverses, billion-dollar deals, and corporate reshuffling to protect some of the very worst people in the industry, a game like this should still have its space to shine.